Overview for
web

Back in December 2014 I did some experimenting with the then unfinished version of the HTTP/2 protocol with the H2O web server. I managed to the the server up and running with the built in PHP server to serve some HTTP/2.

Time to first paint is the one of the most critical user experience for web sites. Essentially what this means is the moment the user sees something on their screens after following a link. This gives the perception of a fast load time, and first impressions count on the web.

Search Engines are a very significant factor in many businesses today. Many companies will fail or succeed depending on their ranking on Bing, DuckDuckGo or Google. This has understandably created a whole industry of Search Engine Optimisation around it. Money talks.

But it's worth noting that SEO, like programming, isn't a tangible good that you can own - it's free as in experience. You can get far in SEO with common sense and understanding that the nature of hypertext.

I wrote an article on using CloudFlare to manage traffic peaks. A commenter on Reddit wished for some statistics. I cannot retrospectively get any response comparison times or anything that would be a truly meaningful benchmark.

Heavyweight corporate IT giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are making significant investments in Node.js and JavaScript. It's becoming the latest technology in something often though of as black magic: Enterprise Integrations

Every once in a while you're lucky and end up with a positive problem - your website content is suddenly very popular. You might scramble and start turning up your servers and tuning up your caches or maybe someone's de-facto solution is to install HHVM to run your WordPress faster.

While this is all worth while if you plan for this to happen in the future as well, for and occasional hit piece of content it might not be worth it.